


these worlds we chose to leave (the one where yunho goes to hogwarts and jaejoong is a muggle)

by saebeok



Category: DBSK|Tohoshinki|TVXQ
Genre: Alternate Universe, Hogwarts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 14:04:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saebeok/pseuds/saebeok
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yunho has a best friend, a skinny mop-headed boy with too-wide eyes named Jaejoong. And Jaejoong is a muggle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these worlds we chose to leave (the one where yunho goes to hogwarts and jaejoong is a muggle)

When he’s ten, Yunho asks and his parents tell him that yes, he’s going to Hogwarts because they are a magical family and that’s what people from magical families do. His father lays a proud hand on his shoulder and Yunho gives him a small smile.

Then he retreats to his room and cries his eyes out.

Because he has a best friend, a skinny, mop-headed boy with too-wide eyes named Jaejoong. And Jaejoong is a muggle.

After his tears die down, after he’s washed his face and stared into the mirror long enough to ascertain that his eyes and nose aren’t too red anymore, Yunho leaves his house and heads to the apartment complex down the street, bounding up the steps two at a time to the fifth floor. Jaejoong’s third sister answers the door but Jaejoong is tagging along right behind her, peeking around her back. When he sees Yunho, his face lights up and in a second he’s grabbed his hand and they’re running downstairs again.

In wordless unanimity, they go to the old playground behind the park; it’s the only place they have to go in this neighbourhood, really, even if it’s so run-down that other children don’t even play there anymore and the equipment is dirty with the graffiti and cigarette burns left behind by the gangs that loiter there at night. It’s a rough district, one that Yunho’s family moved into because his father only managed to find work as a clerk at a muggle law firm. They kick at the empty bottles littering the ground and take stock of what new words have been etched along the side of the slide.

Yunho watches his best friend attempt to hang upside-down from the monkey bars, and dully tells him the bad news. Jaejoong is silent for a while; Yunho isn’t sure if he’s thinking, or just trying hard not to fall on his head.

“You’ll write to me, right?”

“Yeah.” Yunho scuffs the heel of his sneaker on the ground, “I wish you could come with me. Or that I could stay.”

“Maybe there’s a spell or something… You could make me invisible and I’d sneak into your school! Or maybe you could clone yourself.” Jaejoong twists around to give Yunho a precarious grin and Yunho smiles half-heartedly back at him.

“I don’t think it works that way,” he says helplessly.

“Magic can’t solve everything, huh?” Jaejoong muses.

“No, no, it really can’t.”

 

- 

Time passes and now Yunho’s sixteen, just getting off the train from Hogwarts at the beginning of summer. He takes the long, rumbling bus ride home, robes and wand and all other traces of his magical identity hidden in his beat-up travel suitcase. To any casual observer, he’s just another teenage boy in faded jeans and an oversized hoodie, infatuated with the hiphop life – and most days he still feels like this is the true world that he belongs in. He gets off the bus seven blocks from home, thrumming with excitement as he strides to the café where Jaejoong waits tables.  _I’ll be home on the 25 th_, he had written on his most recent letter to Jaejoong, and Jaejoong had written back in his messy scrawl, a simple line on stark paper,  _Come home safe!_

He steps into the café. Jaejoong’s at the counter and Yunho’s heart plummets when he sees him.

Jaejoong’s expression shifts from surprise and an open joy to apprehension as Yunho stalks up to him, ignoring the smattering of patrons inside. “Taehee,” he calls to someone in the workroom behind, “I’m stepping out for five minutes.” Just as Yunho reaches out to grab his wrist he has pulled his hand away, stepping around the cash register. “Yunho-yah, let’s go outside.”

Yunho allows himself to be led out to the alleyway by the café, seething with worry and anger. Putting down his luggage, he notes grimly that Jaejoong is avoiding his eyes, and the moment they stop walking and Jaejoong turns towards him with his arms crossed tightly at his chest and his body hunched in on itself, Yunho says, “what happened to you?”

Because Jaejoong knows him too well, he replies, “I didn’t want you to worry because you had your exams. It’s nothing much, anyway.”

Yunho’s knee-jerk fury deflates a little. He steps closer to Jaejoong and feels an acute pain in his gut when Jaejoong flinches away reflexively. “I’m not mad at you.”

Jaejoong finally looks up at him, allowing Yunho to reach out and gently touch his face, to assess the ugly bruise at the side of his mouth, already beginning to dissipate, and his split lip. Yunho’s fingers ghost over his ribs, his shoulders, taking stock of the splotches of black and blue on his arms. He feels the initial rage rushing out of him like waves rolling out from a shore, leaving behind just a sick feeling of heartache, the disbelief that there is someone out there who would want to hurt Jaejoong.

“Word got out in school that I’m gay,” Jaejoong tries to sound casual. It’s not working. Yunho feels his rage returning, but he suppresses it in order to move and engulf his best friend in a massive but careful hug. Jaejoong squirms a little in mock-protest but eventually settles with loosely wrapping his arms back around Yunho’s waist.

“I’m going to turn them all into frogs,” Yunho says vehemently. And then, more softly, “does it still hurt?”

“It doesn’t really hurt anymore… And believe me, they don’t look better than frogs so don’t waste your effort.” This time it’s Yunho who tries to disengage from the hug, and Jaejoong who doesn’t let him, clinging on and swaying from side to side.

“It wasn’t just one person?” He asks, resigned to staying in Jaejoong’s arms and feeling his hair – dyed a shade of dirty blonde this time – tickling his cheek.

“Would I lose a fight if there were only one person? You have such little faith in me.” Yunho can just  _hear_  the pout in Jaejoong’s voice and he can’t help but smile.

A bus stops across the road from the alley, its doors opening with a loud hiss. They slowly step away from each other, turning to watch as someone gets off and the bus continues on its way. It’s the start of summer but already the afternoon hangs heavy in the air. Yunho can’t get the awful image out of his mind, of Jaejoong being set upon by multiple people and beaten up, and of him not being there to help him fight back. He can’t let something like this happen again. He  _can’t_.

Jaejoong jerks his head in the direction of the café, “Unlike some people, I have a job to return to.” His smile is unfailingly bright, even with the bruises. Yunho ignores how his heart stutters at the sight. It always has and he has a feeling it always will.

“What if I transferred to your school,” he begins, and falters when Jaejoong gives him a pointed look. “Fine, fine. What if I settled for turning them into actual frogs?”

That draws a short, genuine bark of laughter. “My dear Yunho, you can’t solve everything with magic,” it’s that old joke again, deprecatingly wry and yet so heartbreaking. Yunho watches Jaejoong walk back to the café.

Later that night, Jaejoong stays over at Yunho’s. He sits at the edge of the bed and reluctantly lets him kneel at his feet and rub ointment into his skin. It’s the least Yunho can do, but it feels painfully insubstantial. At least it’s summer and Jaejoong won’t be seeing those bastards around all the time. At least he can be there until term begins again, but still –

“What if I,” his words fall short because there isn’t anything he can offer that can truly protect Jaejoong from further harm. His hands come down to rest on Jaejoong’s knees, curling into helpless fists.

“Let’s sleep,” Jaejoong says softly, carding his fingers through Yunho’s hair. “Everything will be okay.”

 

-

They’re twenty-two now, living away from the neighbourhood in which they’d grown up. Jaejoong had left school and moved away to a bigger city to sing at a couple of popular bars, and Yunho joined him after graduating from Hogwarts. They rented a room from an old wizard who had a fireplace in the house, which Yunho uses for the Floo network to get to his office. He is employed at a magical non-profit aimed at improving understandings and relations between the muggle and wizarding worlds, and likes to quip that he serves as the muggle representative. Few people understand how it’s not really a joke. Most days he truly does love his job, though.

The room is small and always a little too dim, and it overlooks a street where there’s terrible traffic in the morning and the commotion on the road makes Jaejoong grumble. But what’s important is that there is room enough to accommodate Jaejoong’s guitars and a small shelf for Yunho’s books, and that their landlord is hard-of-hearing and so won’t complain about Jaejoong waking up at odd hours in the night on inspired whims to compose songs. Yunho always stirs from his sleep to see him sitting cross-legged by the window, scribbling into his notebook or quietly plucking at his guitar, and is always greeted with the same guilty expression, visible because of the light from the street lamps and neon signs outside their window.

He always murmurs, “It’s okay, I don’t mind.”

“Sleep, my love,” Jaejoong says, and Yunho drifts off to sleep again listening to half-formed verses and haunting guitar melodies.

One day they return to visit their parents, and decide to stop by the playground for old times’ sake. It’s still there, and not razed to the ground like Jaejoong had predicted. Everything looks a little more worse for wear. The colours on the slide and monkey bars have faded unevenly in patches and the older lines of graffiti have been written over multiple times. The paint has all but peeled off the surrounding lampposts. Jaejoong looks a little sadly at the swing, now broken, its seat hanging lopsidedly off just one chain, and Yunho tries to kick the bottles littering the ground into a neat heap. It’s windy and a lone page from a newspaper drifts by, buoyed along like a phantom. As usual, there are no children.

“Everything looks so small now,” Jaejoong quips. He smiles and Yunho can’t help but move to stand beside him and take his hand.

On a whim, he draws out his wand and mutters a spell. They watch as the swing repairs itself and the colours on everything seem to become more vibrant, as the trash and graffiti disappear and the playground becomes new again, the way it had probably been long before they’d discovered it as children. Pristine, untouched, perfect.

It’s completely unrecognisable, scrubbed clean of memories.

Jaejoong’s grip on his left hand tightens and he feels a strange sense of loss as they silently regard the sight for a while. Then Jaejoong lets go and reaches into his pocket to take out his cell phone. He snaps some photos of the playground before turning to look at Yunho. “I’m recording what we could’ve had as kids,” he explains.

Yunho has to make a decision and now he knows what it’s going to be. He draws Jaejoong close and kisses him, “let’s take one together.”

So they do; Jaejoong hangs upside-down by his knees on the monkey bars and Yunho stands next to where he’s suspended, holding the phone at arm’s length. They’re both laughing when Yunho takes the photo. Around them, everything about the place is resplendent, and when they turn the picture around it’s as though Jaejoong’s hair (uncoloured for the first time in a long while) cannot be contained by gravity.

When it’s finally time to go catch their train, Yunho takes one more look at the playground before lifting his wand again. Then he reverses the spell he’d cast, draining out the bright colours and putting back the scrawled epithets and phone numbers and anger and endearments. The swing remains fixed, though, and he leaves out the trash. He hears Jaejoong laugh softly and knows that it didn’t go unnoticed.

“Let’s go.”

 

-

A week later, a photo falls out of Yunho’s messenger bag when he’s taking out a folder of documents at work. It turns out that Jaejoong had sent for that picture to be developed. Flipping it around, Yunho reads Jaejoong’s scribbled message at the back and his heart fills with an immense fondness.

_Most people can only imagine what could have been._

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Hogwarts prompt on the Challenge on Infinite Earths.
> 
> When I got towards the end of writing this, I had a legitimate internal struggle as to whether Yunho should reverse his spell or not. Thankfully, he was more decisive about it than I was.


End file.
